Before the Revolution

In a Village Voice article this week titled "Living in Oblivion" (okay, written by me), I suggest that Bush II could inspire the same type of American movie renaissnace that the Reagan-era helped produce in the late 1980s.

It's mostly speculation, but I clearly tapped a nerve. Just check out Ted Hope's response when I asked him if he had any thoughts on the subject. There's, of course, many factors that allowed for the American indie movement (the rise of video, for example) that I neglected to mention, but it's a nice thought: that something good could actually come from the four miserable years we have ahead of us.

Besides shameless shelf-promotion, I also wanted to take this opportunity to include some worthy quotes from some industry folks that didn't make it into the final article:

"You can start to see how mainstream film is the reflection, in an uncritical way, of the current political economic formation and how that reverberates through this aesthetic system in a way that solidifies and makes this system more acceptable and pervasive and disables people from being critical, strictly on an aesthetic level.

"I really felt that Spiderman 2, since Goebbels passed away, was the most effective piece of political propaganda. In addition to other straightforward ways, it pervaded this great sense of fraudulence, of the way in which it recreated the city in this fantastically and unrealistic way, this generalized acceptance that fraud, inconsistency and doing things simply because they